No turning back, oil PSU divestment on: PM

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister A B Vajpayee has ruled out another pause in the disinvestment of HPCL and BPCL. The forthright stance came at an emergent conclave on Thursday after the government’s parliamentary managers had a strange attack of nerves when the Congress lapsed briefly into the attack mode.
Unnerved by the assessment that the Opposition could stall the passage of the Finance Bill or even force a vote on disinvestment that could see some desertions from the ruling coalition, Mr Vajpayee said that the government was not going to reverse the disinvestment gears under any circumstance.
Parliament managers hit the panic stations as soon as the Congress launched its attack. The aggression defied the estimate that the principal opposition would refrain from taking hostile postures. The dissent from Shiv Sena and Samata, though not reflecting any principled opposition, added to the growing anxiety level, with some of Mr Vajpayee’s colleagues beginning to conjure up bleak scenarios.
In reality, however, what they were facing was not a government-threatening scenario but an instance of disparate factors coming together to produce an outcome that none of the protagonists had in mind. Congress which wanted to lodge a pro forma protest, decided to hit the trenches after it emerged that the saffron benches were itching for a confrontation during the discussion on sports administration that the House was scheduled to take up in the afternoon. The agitation by the Congress forced the Shiv Sena and Samata to put up a performance in line with their earlier protests against privatisation. And just when the assessment threatened to go haywire, the pragmatists on the saffron benches who prefer caution in the run-up to the polls stepped in with the advice of a tactical retreat.
Soon many senior leaders huddled in the Prime Ministers’ office in the Parliament complex. Mr Vajpayee announced his verdict after patiently hearing all the participants — deputy prime minister L K Advani, parliamentary affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, finance minister Jaswant Singh, disinvestment minister Arun Shourie, petroleum minister Ram Naik, law minister Arun Jaitley and BJP’s chief whip in the Lok Sabha, V K Malhotra. His line of resistance was supported by Mr Advani and the finance minister.
That the panic was misplaced became evident from the quick restoration of normalcy with the Opposition not coming in the way of the passage of the Finance Bill.